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July 31, 2006

Ten Arguments for Sanity, 3-4

Continuing with non-Scriptural, natural law arguments against homosexual marriage.

3. It will drive a deeper wedge between man and woman.

The unhappy parting of man and woman that I have described in argument 2 is already a common feature of our day. In my own lifetime I have witnessed the last petering out of a tradition of song and poetry that had lasted eight hundred years, from the troubadours of Provence to its last and decadent efflorescence among the rockers of the 1960’s. I am speaking about poetry and song of love. What has happened to it? Men no longer celebrate the beauty of women they admire from afar, whose hand they aspire to hold; more to the point, men are no longer inspired by women, as Dante was by his Beatrice, and Petrarch by his Laura. The reasons are distressing. It takes a good man to admire a woman, and a good woman to be admired by a man. But does a good man snarl at woman, calling her names that I do not care to repeat here, or, even if he is too polite to use the words, treating her as such? Does a good woman look down with ignorant contempt upon her brothers?

Perhaps the reader will ask what homosexuality has to do with this problem. It is simple: the acceptance of homosexuality is predicated upon the tacit assumption that male and female are not made for one another. It defines male apart from female, female apart from male; or it leaves those terms free-floating, without definition. Young men and young women already are growing up without understanding what they are to be for one another. Again, the results are predictable. Fewer young people marry. When they do marry, their emphasis on personal fulfillment, rather than on interpersonal and complementary gifts, bodes ill for the survival of the marriage; for a spouse will destroy many a foolish daydream of youth. They will have fewer children. In no western country does the birth rate now assure even a replacement of one generation by the next; in many countries, the birth rate is so low as to constitute a slow and numb despair, a resignation to cultural suicide. If this situation is to be reversed, and the unarguable mathematics shows that countries like Italy and Japan are rapidly nearing a point of irreversible decline, then men and women must be brought together again. How they can be brought together, when we offer them the chance, though delusory, to “fulfill” themselves sexually apart from one another, or when we implicitly affirm that sex is simply a matter of individual preferences, is hard for me to fathom.

4. It makes a mockery of chastity.

Every faculty of man has its proper use. If I walk every day, I will develop strong legs for standing and walking and bracing myself. That is what legs are for. Chastity is the virtue of using one’s sexual desires properly. Since the act that is biologically designed to produce babies has the predictable propensity to, well, produce babies, and since the desire to perform that act is one of man’s strongest and most violent drives, all cultures have resorted to means of curbing that desire or channeling it towards healthy ends. Before the advent of the modern welfare state, most peoples laid heavy blame on those who brought children into the world when they were unfit to care for them. Traditions regarding these matters vary from culture to culture, but several things remain notably constant. If you indulge yourself in the marital act and produce a baby out of wedlock, you are in big trouble. In general, that act is reserved for marriage, or for something closely associated with it (as, for instance, is the tradition among some peoples, where a man is duty-bound to sleep with his brother’s childless widow, that his brother’s seed may endure).

Chastity has all kinds of practical considerations going for it. If you are chaste, you stand a much lower chance of being beaten or murdered by someone driven witless by jealousy; you will probably not contract certain filthy and debilitating, even deadly, diseases, and if your spouse is chaste, you certainly will not contract them; your marriage begins in better shape, as you will not be spoiled or confused by memories of previous affairs, many of them painful; you will not help destroy a family with your looseness, your own family or someone else’s. The psychological considerations are greater still. What insanity of ours, that we encourage boys and girls to set forth on a long series of sexual train wrecks, with all their concomitant misunderstandings, abuses, and treacheries, as preparation for lifelong marriage! It is a miracle almost if they do not reach their twenties as thoroughly cynical about themselves and the opposite sex as is the most embittered divorcee. How can love survive the bath in acid?

But how can we recommend chastity to the young, when we enshrine the principal that what they do with their genitals is strictly their own business, and that such activity is all for personal fulfillment? What value can sexual restraint possibly have, except as some cold, calculating means towards keeping one’s resume clean along the road to wealth and power? In particular, how can we even talk about chastity when we accept homosexuality? For a homosexual defines himself or herself by the action. A teenager calls himself homosexual because he has performed homosexual acts. It is utterly incoherent to suppose that we can ever recommend to “straight” teenagers a chastity that must be violated by the homosexual in order for him to define himself as such. What homosexual could possibly “wait until marriage,” even if such “marriages” were made legal? What reason would there be for him to do so? In short, if homosexual acts are accepted, there remains no reason at all to condemn or even frown upon premarital sex.

That point illustrates what I have often argued, namely that sex can never be merely a matter of satisfying an individual's desires. We are all in the same cultural boat. What you compel me to condone in one case will cause me also to condone other things, necessarily. We are not islands unto ourselves.

33 Comments

As to point 3, the gays and lesbians will rejoin that it is not their "marriages" which will cause these problems. They will point out that contraception, abortion and divorce, all practiced by heterosexuals, including married ones, is the problem. While your argument has merit, the acceptance of homosexuality in general and same-sex marriage in particular are more caused by than a cause of the problems you mentioned. As I and many others have asserted before, Christians must clean up our own act in this area before attempting to deal with the homosexual issue. "Conservative" Christians may not be as guilty of abortion, but we are just as guilty, or nearly so, of contraception and divorce as society at large. Luther (and I believe St. Thomas) specifically labeled contraceptive sex as sodomitic -- that is the same sin committed by homosexuals. It is hard to convince someone else that they need to repent a sin which you yourself are still committing.

But you see, Angel, a person simply is not "homosexual" -- that is a subjective self-categorization, not a meaningful reality. People do not come in two categories, "homosexual" and "heterosexual" (or if you want to add a third, "bisexual").

We are simply, as physical beings, sexual.

This is a good thing, but like all good human things, it is distorted and twisted by sin. When I am married, I will feel sexual desire toward my wife, and it is good that I should do so. But I might find myself attracted to another man, or to another man's wife. Both of these are disordered, and both of them are reprehensible acts of sin. One is (in its essence) more "unnatural," but neither is more sinful. And if at one moment I desire a man, I am not therefore "homosexual," any more than if the next day I desire his wife I am therefore "heterosexual" -- or, should I do both concurrently, I am therefore "bisexual" (yes, I'm simplifying that term for my purposes, but in general use it's too vague to be meaningful anyway).

Some people probably (almost certainly) have a strong proclivity toward desires for persons of the same sex; others have little or no tendency toward such desires. That doesn't really affect the argument; we expect disordered desires, and we have no reason to expect everyone will be tempted toward the same ones to the same degree; it would be surprising if they were (also kind of boring, but that's another story). The point is that, as a Christian, I know which desires are rightly ordered, and which are not. The former I pursue, to God's glory; the latter I crucify. Is it easy? No, certainly not. But no one said following Christ was easy. Only that it was best; and that it was the only way to become the complete human beings God created us to be.

GL, I've argued many a time before that one cannot simultaneously accept the licitness of contraception and maintain a coherent natural law argument against "gay marriage". Thank you for making it too... It leaves you with little more than Scripture says thus, which is of course a perfectly good reason for those who accept Scripture to obey, but utterly useless in the political realm.

Firinnteine, you're right that heterosexual and homosexual are, to happily put the shoe on the other foot for once, category mistakes. And the most interesting thing to me is that the hard pro-GLBT left, queer theorists, are the group making the argument too, i.e., that people simply desire what they desire and do what they do and there is no category or label that one belongs to. Of course, they extend this view to include notions of gender itself, which seems rather dubious. Everybody either has or has not a Y-chromosome. But everybody has a mind numbing complex of genes, environmental factors, experiences, habits, and past choices influencing their sexual preference. To say people who prefer sexual activity with their same sex form a category (e.g., "homosexual") only in the same way that people who prefer broccoli to brussel sprouts (e.g., "brocconormativists") form a category.

Jennifer, I'm fairly sure that they call themselves asexuals and are beginning to clamour for special rights. There was an article about asexuality in one of the free (and dreadful) publications left out for the taking on campus.

Yes, you are quite right, it is incoherent for Christians to complain about homosexual marriage when their own house is in such flagrant disorder. But one of the most insidious things about the homosexual movement is that its success will make the rollback of the sexual revolution practically impossible, even unthinkable. That revolution caused the trouble we are in now; but a legalization of homosexual marriage will lock it in place.....

Jennifer,

The scholastic term for such a person is "insensible," and it is a personality defect, not a moral defect.

I agree. It might be helpful in making such points, however, to explicitly acknowledge Christian complicity in creating the situation in which approval of the homosexual lifestyle and even marriage has come about and to call on Christians to repent. You would not be disclosing a problem for same-sex marriage opponents which the same-sex marriage propoents have not themselves raised and would be making it clear that you are not limiting your arguments to homosexuals but are applying them to all to whom they in fact do apply, including your fellow opponents of same-sex marriage. I honestly believe that there is little likelihood of success in opposing greater marriage-like rights, if not "marriage" itself, for homosexual couples, unless and until Christians who oppose such developments publicly confess and repent of their sins of heterosexual fornication, pornography use, contraception, abortion, and divorce. Until we do, proponents of such changes can rightly label us as hypocrites.

Gentlepeople,
We have it on good authority that all these problems arise from idolatory which must have been preceded by ingratitude. Because, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man...wherefore God gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves.

Yeah, it's ugly, but predictable. The only cure is getting the Word out.

"Asexual rights." O help... do I get rights because I'm unmarried and therefore do not have sex with anyone? Can I get a tax break? "Inhibited Religious Person Rights," perhaps? ;)

Query -- is it possible that some (presumably not all) of those who are so led of God that they can best serve Him by remaining celibate might also receive a diminishing, even a severe diminishing, of sexual desire? Such a diminishing would probably be rightly viewed as supernatural (which does not exclude natural elements); would it be a "personality defect"? (And if so, why?)

My understanding is that self-described asexuals are less interested in "special rights" than in not being regarded as freaks. Some explicitly identify their struggle for acceptance with that of gays (and awful terms like "queer" and "heteronormativity" raise their ugly heads), but it seems that most are just people who have no interest in the sexual act and are sick of being made fun of for it.

While everybody was busy discussing the finer points of natural law arguments, the other shoe has dropped, according to Robert P. George, writing over at First Things:

>>>August 2, 2006

Robert P. George writes:

For years, critics of the idea of same-sex “marriage” have made the point that accepting the proposition that two persons of the same sex can marry each other entails abandoning any principled basis for understanding marriage as the union of two and only two persons. So far as I am aware, our opponents have made no serious effort to answer or rebut this point. Their strategy has been to dismiss it as a mere slippery-slope argument (although the truth is that it is a more fundamental type of argument than that) and to accuse us of engaging in “scare tactics.” Some have even denounced us as “bigots” for suggesting that same-sex relations are on a par with polygamy and “polyamory”—the union of three or more persons in a sexual partnership.

That was then; this is now.

A group of self-identified “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender and allied activists, scholars, educators, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists, and community organizers” has released a statement explicitly endorsing “committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner.” Got that? More than one conjugal partner.

The people putting out this statement are not fringe figures. The more than 300 signatories include feminist icon Gloria Steinem, NYU sociologist Judith Stacey, Columbia University anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, Georgetown law professors Robin West and Chai Feldblum, the Rev. Cecil Charles Prescod of Love Makes a Family Inc., Yale law professor Kenji Yoshino, Princeton religion professor Cornel West, writer Barbara Ehrenreich, and Pat Clark, former executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

The statement—titled “Beyond Gay Marriage”—lays out with remarkable candor and clarity the agenda of their movement. They have said what very few “gay marriage” advocates have heretofore been willing to reveal for fear that it would alienate people who might otherwise be persuaded to support same-sex “marriage” on the theory that “love makes a family.” These are people who do not want to change the meaning of marriage or undermine the institution, but who might be open to the idea of “extending” marriage to “committed, loving same-sex couples.”

In acknowledging that under the doctrine of “love makes a family,” what applies to “committed, loving same-sex couples” must apply to “committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner,” the signatories to “Beyond Gay Marriage” exhibit the virtues of intellectual honesty and logical consistency.

And they let the cat out of the bag. What lies “beyond gay marriage” are multiple sex partners.

The choice facing us as a nation is this: Either we retain as legally normative the traditional conjugal understanding of marriage as the exclusive union of one man and one woman, or we give legal standing and public approbation to every form of consensual sexual partnering and child rearing, including polygamy and polyamory. Just ask those notable “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and allied activists, scholars educators, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists, and community organizers.” They’ll tell you exactly what lies “beyond gay marriage.” They already have.

(Access contributors’ biographies by clicking here.)

12:19 PM<<<

When I mentioned to some friends that gay marriage was a stalking horse for polygamy, they laughed at me. Now I think I was far too cautious.

It strikes me that some are making "the perfect the enemy of the good" argument--that unless all houses are in perfect order, we cannot ask any other to similarily act. An impossible standard, in my book. In fact, it's a license for anarchy, as it assumes the perfectability of mankind--a utopian ideal if every there were one. If, as I assume, mankind is fallible, aren't we to use (and define) concepts of civilizational norms that serve as guardrails, keeping man on the straight and narrow (so to speak), rather than experimenting with "if it feels good, do it" mores that accentuate mankind's baser appetite?

>>>t strikes me that some are making "the perfect the enemy of the good" argument--that unless all houses are in perfect order, we cannot ask any other to similarily act.<<<

It's just a variation on the moral equivalency argument. The U.S. military sometimes kills civilians by accident, which makes it no better than al Qaeda, which targets civilians deliberately. Somehow, though, the argument is never taken to its logical conclusion.

Also, I thought the premise for these "Arguments for Sanity" were based on natural law, and not religion, but the objections thereto seem to be argued from a religious perspective. Not to be a spoilsport, but the natural law approach interests me. Looking forward to nos. 5-10.

Forbes, I think pagans of the Roman sort,or Stoics or colonial American Deists, would find these arguments quite convincing - not at all religion-dependent. They DO depend on valuing some things - for example, chastity - which all sane civilizations have valued...

It strikes me that some are making "the perfect the enemy of the good" argument--that unless all houses are in perfect order, we cannot ask any other to similarily act. An impossible standard, in my book. In fact, it's a license for anarchy, as it assumes the perfectability of mankind--a utopian ideal if every there were one.

If that is a reply to my earlier posts, you are missing the point. I am not arguing that gay marriage shouldn't be resisted. Rather, I am arguing that Christians who practice sins of the same category are not likely to succeed until they recognize that fact (which gay marriage proponents have in fact already done), confess those sins and repent of them. One can hardly expect to convince someone to stop committing sodomitic acts because they harm society when everyone knows that that the person making that case is himself committing sodomitic acts. One can hardly expect to convince someone to not make a mockery of marriage by marrying someone of the same sex when everyone knows that that the person making that case is himself making a mockery of marriage by tolerating serial marriages.

I am not saying Tony is guilty of this hypocrisy. I seriously doubt he is and he has, in fact, condemned contraception, abortion and divorce just as forcefully as he is not condemning gay marraige. He belongs to a church that has officially held firm to the ancient Christian teachings on all of these issues. He is not responsible for the fact that many of his fellow Catholics ignore their church's teaching. Nor am I saying that someone guilty of such sins in the past cannot ever make arguments against gay marriage. I am a sinner guilty of such sins in my past, but I have recognized, confessed and repented of them. The problem is that many Evangelical Protestants (of which I am one) condone contraception, silently tolerate abortion when it is their daughters who get pregnant out-of-wedlock, and have rates of divorce that exceed the national average. We will not win this battle until and unless we recognize our own complicity in creating the problems we have today.

The position is not original to me. Our Lord articulated it nearly 2000 years ago:

Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, "Let me take the speck out of your eye," when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

Matthew 7:1-5 (ESV).

If you doubt anyone has noticed a connection, consider the words of the man who is now Archbishop of Canterbury, head of a communion which has priest and bishops in it who bless same-sex unions:

In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures.

Let's not forget that it was the Anglican Communion which first reversed the 1900 year consistent and universal Christian teaching that contraception is gravely sinful. I frankly do not believe that it is a coincidence that it now has clergy blessing same-sex unions.

Evangelical Protestants must wake up to our own sins if we are to be effective advocates against gay marriage. The people we must convince will see us as nothing but self-righteous hypocrites until we do.

Bravo, GL! As you state, the point is not one of saying that we must first have our house in perfect order, but rather that too many on our side deny that our house is seriously out of order in ways directly related to this issue.

Stuart, many thanks for posting Prof. George's piece here. And otherwise an excellent post from you.

Indeed -- I do think that contraception has been, historically and logically, the linchpin of the revolution. Dr. John Rock, inventor of the pill, hailed it ex post facto as the greatest agent of cultural change in the 20th century. Exactly. One could write for a long, long time on the cultural devastation it has been responsible for, or, I should say, is even now wreaking, because we won't see the extent of the damage as long as marriage remains the norm in the West -- though as yet a very badly tottering one.
Which reminds me of a question I have been eager to ask on this site:
If it can be shown that contraception not only undermines the common weal but actually, in the long run, undermines marriage itself and thus the possibility for a cohesive society, THEN not only may a society prohibit the drugs and balloons and poison caps, it would be derelict in its duty if it did NOT. There can be no private right to engage in a practice which, if made universally available, would destroy the society that allows it.

GL: I appreciate the response. Nonetheless, your argument strikes me as a distinction without a difference. The proposition that we all should repent and sin no more, is a state of perfection, IMO. And, I should add, a worthy individual objective or ideal, but to place a reluctance to advocate civilizational/cultural norms on the basis of failure to collectively achieve individual perfection, is not only to ask nothing of your fellow man, but to abandone the debate to your opposition.

I do not believe it would be wise to recriminalize contraception. First, this is a hypothetical. In a democracy where more than 90% of all Americans have, are or plan to use contraceptives and believe them to be perfectly permissible if not a positive good, it would be impossible to enact, and to enforce if enacted, such laws. Second, even if enacted, given the current public attitude, it would breed even more contempt for the law in general and in government than already exist. Allow me to quote St. Thomas:

Human law . . . does not lay upon the multitude of imperfect men the burdens of those who are already virtuous, viz., that they should abstain from all evil. Otherwise, those imperfect ones, being unable to bear such precepts, would break out into yet greater evils: thus it is written . . . (Matth. ix. 17) that if new wine, i.e., precepts of a perfect life, is put into old bottles, i.e., into imperfect men, the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, i.e., the precepts are despised, and those men, from contempt, break out into evils worse still.

Indeed, I believe that is exactly what has happened. Contraception was generally legal during the first 3/4 of the 19th century, until the enactment of the Comstock Laws. It was, however, held to be gravely sinful by all Christian denominations and was, in fact, a cause for the exercise of church discipline when discovered. Anthony Comstock's zeal led to enacting a law at which the "imperfect" chafed, resulting in organized resistance and ultimately a growing contempt for that law. This contempt broke out in the ways of which we are all now sadly aware in the 20th century and now we have not only a much wider use of contraception than before the Comstock Law was enacted, but legalized abortion, "no-fault" divorce, high rates of out-of-wedlock births, adultery as entertainment, and gay "marriage." The post-bellum Congress would have done better to have ignored Comstock and heeded St. Thomas.

GL: Perhaps the best response is Mr. Altena'a above, just below your response. If what you're asking is that "we" acknowledge (rather than deny) that our house is in disorder before moving on to address these related issues--that I can live with.

I am personally partial to natural law arguments--if only from the perspective that many people are deaf to arguments from the Scriptures.

We are in essential agreement. All I am advocating is that we recognize our own complicity and that when we make points which apply equally to practices permitted by those of our own tradition who nonetheless condemn homosexual acts and "marriage," we not ignore that but admonish our brothers and sisters to consider how their sins are of the same category as those they condemn, confess them if/when they come to recognize them as sin, and repent. Perhaps my posts leave the impression that I would require perfection before we act. If so, forgive my inarticulateness.

A slight clarification. I would say that GL and I do not advocate that we must get our house entirely in order before addressing the related issues. We can tackle both at once. But we do need frankly to own up to the disorders in our own house, and to be seen as taking firm steps to address those, before we can have credibility with the world in tackling those related issues.

Dear Prof. Esolen,

I agree with GL that trying to criminalize use of contraception would do far more harm than good. (The Volstead Act is of course Exhibit A in this regard.) We must be wary of the temptation to try to play God, to enforce ALL that we hold to be good at the point of a gun, and instead unwittingly but inevitably make the state a new Moloch, an all-powerful and all-consuming tyranny, as a result of trying to re-establish an O.T. style theodicy. Gossip is arguably a far more destructive sin than contraception; but an attempt to go beyond libel and slander laws to regulate all conversation would be the ultimate totalitarian nightmare. And then there is the worst sin of all, pride -- how do we go about making pride illegal and legally punishing it?

Even within the Church, Christ warns us to endure patiently with the existence of tares amidst the corn, so long as they do not choke out the corn altogether. We do not of course disregard all sin and have no laws; but we must exercise a prudential judgment as to what laws are actually enforceable, if we are not to bring the law into disrepute.

And, as vigorously as I have opposed homosexual apologetics in the postings I made to your first series, I have mixed feelings about the criminalization of sexual acts in private between consenting adults. (Yes, I'm aware of the pitfalls in that language, but I don't have better terms off-hand.) We of course can and should criminalize public acts or consequences of homosexual conduct, just as we do for those of alcoholics and drug addicts, or have fines rather than jail terms. But I class homosexuals with alcoholics and drug addicts as deeply broken and wounded sinners, in need of healing rather than punishment. Putting a homosexual in jail or flogging him won't change his sexual appetites; the desire for such punishments seems more geared toward satisfying our passions than the demands of justice or the objective of redemption, which would be sin on our part instead. We must be wary of demonizing this sin as worse than many other sins which in fact outweigh it. (Especially since, if we're going to be consistent in the manner that GL and I have argued is needed, then this would also require imprisoning all adulterers, all masturbating teenagers, and all fornicators, including those who have remarried after divorce and whose prior spouses are still living.)

Sometimes the law is too blunt a weapon to wield in the cause of virtue. This is a point where I think it would be best for pastors and priests reading this blog to weigh in and give their judgment, as they are the ones who most often confront and counsel parishioners ensnared in this sin. I ask them to do so.

>But we do need frankly to own up to the disorders
>in our own house, and to be seen as taking firm
>steps to address those, before we can have
>credibility with the world in tackling those
>related issues.

Christians as a whole will never be "moral enough"
in the eyes of the world to have "credibility". That's
what makes this argument a red herring - well, that
and that it gets brought out only to say "stop saying
all this stuff that the world finds so offensive!"

At other times, this tender concern for publicly
visible personal morality seems scant in evidence ...

I'll ask you the same question I asked Forbes: What then is your understanding and how would you apply the words of our Lord in Matthew 7:1-5? You are free (and likely wise) to dismiss my views, but Christians may not dismiss the instructions of the One whom we claim to be our Lord.

I'm afraid that, as GL points out in different words, your argument is the "red herring" for avoiding our Lord's commandments. And, contrary to your assertion, while we of course can never gain credibility with the world as a whole, we certainly can (and must) gain it with those whose minds are still open. I am one person who came out of unbelief into the Church in large part because I saw Christians living truly moral lives in a way that even the best "worldly" people did not, and standing against things I considered evil (fornication, abortion, ans so on). Likewise, that was also in large part how the Church won converts in the early centuries -- by the lives Christians led, as evidence of the doctrines they preached. Even the stony-hearted apostate Emperor Julian exclaimed in bitter envy, "See how these Christians love one another!" We presumably cannot convert everyone; but if our house is not in enough order that our words are not backed by our deeds, then we can convert no-one at all. As St. Francis of Assisi said, "You may be the only Gospel your neighbor ever reads."